knows that instead of a stern accuser to expose before the author of his nature those frail passages which, like the scored matter in the book before you, checker the volume of the brightest and best spent life, his mercy will obscure from the eye of his purity, and our repentance blot them out forever." Opposite this passage in Carpenter's copy of Erskine's speeches, in his private library in Milwaukee, he has written, " I believe this." Such was Matthew Hale Carpenter, a great and profound lawyer, a matchless orator, a noble-minded, tender-hearted, lov able man, with charity and good will to man beating in his heart, a man whose faults and frailties but endear him to any one conscious of his own shortcomings, — and who of us is not? Though one of the most conspicuous figures in the United States Senate during the most trying period of this country's history, Carpenter was in his intellectual make-up a lawyer pure and simple. He once said, " I have been called a bad politician, a bad man, a bad almost every thing, but never so far as I know a bad lawyer." When in 1881 he lay dying in Washington, his lifelong friend, Judge Arthur McArthur, came into his room. As McArthur sat down by the bed and took his hand, the weary eyes of the dying man showed no light of recognition. Sud
denly a smile illumined the wan face and he said playfully, " Judge, I want to make a motion." " It is granted, Matt," said his friend, but before he had finished the reply the great lawyer had gathered his feet up into the bed, and that mysterious change which we, in our childish ignorance of a better name, are pleased to call " death," had emptied the crumbling house of its immortal tenant. Had his arguments and speeches been taken down and preserved; had there been a Boswell or a Lockhart to have caught and recorded the essence of his personality, his memory would be both great and frag rant to the third and fourth generation of future members of our profession. But the greatest of lawyers may hardly dare to hope that his memory among his brethren will live beyond a few short months. The eye of some future plodder may catch his name in a law report, but before the sod on his grave has twice grown green and withered, he is as though he had never been. We brother lawyers may as well be as decent to one another as we can. We are all travelling in the same direction, and will probably lie near together in our graves. Let us do all the kind things for one an other we can, for we shall certainly pass this way but once. And whatever our views about the future, when we are dead we will probably be dead a long time.
